Material Design for Android

Material design is a comprehensive guide for visual, motion, and
interaction design across platforms and devices.
To use material design in your Android apps, follow the guidelines defined
in the material design specification and use
the new components and styles available in the material design support
library. This page provides an overview of the patterns and APIs you should use.

Android provides the following features to help you build material design apps:

A material design app theme to style all your UI widgets

Widgets for complex views such as lists and cards

New APIs for custom shadows and animations

Material theme and widgets

To take advantage of the material features such as styling for standard UI
widgets, and to streamline your app's style definition, apply a
material-based theme to your app.

Use one of many other material components for your app layout and navigation, such
as collapsing toolbars, tabs, a bottom nav bar, and more.
To see them all, check out the
Material Components for Android
catalog

And whenever possible, use predefined material icons. For example, the
navigation "menu" button for your navigation drawer should use the standard "hamburger"
icon. See Material Design Icons for a list of
available icons. You can also import SVG icons from the material icon library with
Android Studio's Vector Asset
Studio.

Elevation shadows and cards

In addition to the X and Y properties, views in Android have a Z
property. This new property represents the elevation of a view, which determines:

The size of the shadow: views with higher Z values cast bigger shadows.

The drawing order: views with higher Z values appear on top of other views.

Elevation is often applied when your layout includes a card-based layout, which
helps you display important pieces of information inside cards that provide a material look.
You can use the CardView widget to create cards with
a default elevation. For more information, see
Create a Card-Based Layout.